Question from Reddit user:
Hi, I’ve been running Google ads for the last few months, in order to generate lead form submissions. However, I’ve noticed the quality of leads to be pretty poor when the form has been submitted from a basic gmail account (example@gmail.com) as compared to a business email account (example@example.com).
Is it possible to have Google ads only fire a conversion when the lead form has been submitted by a business account? – if this is possible, I’m hoping it would teach the machine learning to go for business accounts rather than @gmail accounts?
Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Yes, it is absolutely possible to only fire a conversion in Google Ads when the form has been submitted with a business email address, and doing so is an excellent strategy to improve your lead quality and train Google’s machine learning algorithms.
You cannot do this with a standard Google Tag Manager (GTM) setup alone because the validation logic is too complex and sensitive to handle on the client side.
The robust solution is to use a server-side tagging environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, in conjunction with the Google Ads API, to process the email address, validate its domain, and then only send the conversion signal when the email is confirmed as a business address.
The long answer is:
Your idea to filter conversions based on email domain is spot-on for optimizing lead quality, as it directly addresses your observation about the value difference between generic and business emails.
The reason this requires a server-side solution is two-fold.
First, to properly validate an email domain as a “business” domain (i.e., not a free email service like gmail.com, outlook.com, etc.), the logic often involves maintaining a list of excluded domains, which is cumbersome to manage in client-side JavaScript.
Second, and more importantly, you want this process to be highly reliable and not susceptible to user browser issues, ad blockers, or code tampering.
The optimal solution uses Google Tag Manager to capture the form submission data, including the email address and the Google Click ID (gclid), and then sends that data to a server-side container hosted on a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
On the server, a custom process or function intercepts this data.
This server-side function performs the critical validation: it checks the domain of the submitted email address against your list of excluded free email providers.
If the domain is not on the excluded list, the server then uses the Google Ads API’s Offline Conversion Upload Service to send the conversion event, along with the captured gclid, back to Google Ads.
This method ensures that Google Ads only registers a conversion for a high-quality, pre-qualified lead.
By feeding this high-quality conversion data back into Google Ads, you are effectively training its machine learning models, such as those used in Smart Bidding, to preferentially bid on auctions that are more likely to result in a business lead, thereby dramatically improving your return on ad spend (ROAS) and overall lead quality.
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